Best of

the Twin Cities

Best Festival

Minnesota Renaissance Festival

The best festivals are unguarded, sprawling, open-container parties. Here, grown men and women unabashedly show off their 14th-century finest, and children run feral bearing turkey legs as big as theirs. The festival’s full of food and mead. (Really: The alcohol is called “mead.”) You can pay to throw tomatoes at a man’s face as he insults you, slash your sibling in the head with a dulled fencing sword, or cavort with dirty barn animals. The Renaissance Fest isn’t the classiest carnival to roll through the Twin Cities. Instead, it’s bawdy and boisterous. A worthwhile drunken romp.